Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

“As they came up on the wheel,” Wohl said. “But, starting with the Flannery job—”

“That’s the one that’s missing?” Washington interrupted.

“The one before that. The one he turned loose naked with her hands tied behind her in Fairmount Park.”

Washington nodded his understanding, put a shrimp in his mouth, and waited for Wohl to continue.

“Dick Hemmings got the Flannery job on the wheel,” Wohl said. “Then Teddy Spanner gave him the whole job. When it became pretty certain what it was, one doer.”

“Dick Hemmings is a good cop,” Washington said. “What do you think we can do he hasn’t already done?”

Then he raised his whiskey glass, which Matt saw was now empty, over his head. When he had caught the waitress’s eye, he raised his other hand and made a circular motion, ordering another round.

Matt took another sip of his ale. He was doing his best to follow the conversation, which he found fascinating. He wondered what “the wheel” they were talking about was, but decided it would not to be wise to ask. Washington had already made it plain he held him in contempt; a further proof of ignorance would only make things worse.

“The one thing we need is a—two things. We need first a good description of the doer. Since we don’t have a description, we need a profile. I’ve been thinking of talking to a psychiatrist—”

“Save your time,” Tony Harris said. “I can tell you what a shrink will tell you. We’re dealing with a sicko here. He gets his rocks off humiliating women. He hates his mother. Maybe he was screwing his mother, or she kept bringing guys home and taking them to bed. Something. Anyway, he hates her, and is getting back at her by hitting on these women. No hookers, you notice. Nice little middle-class women. That’s what you’d get from a shrink.”

He closed the file and handed it across the table to Washington.

“Jason’s very good with people,” Wohl said. “I thought it would be a good idea if he reinterviewed all the victims.”

If Jason Washington heard Wohl, there was no sign. He was very carefully reading the file.

“I’ll lay you ten to one that when we finally catch this scumbag,” Tony Harris said, “it will come out that he’s been going to one of your shrinks, Inspector, and that one of those scumbags has been reading the papers and knows fucking well his seventy-five-dollar-an-hour patient is the guy who’s been doing this. But he won’t call us. Physician-patient confidentiality is fucking sacred. Particularly when the patient is coughing up seventy-five bucks an hour two, three times a week.

”

“I don’t know how far Hemmings, or anybody, has checked out sexual offenders,” Wohl said.

“I’ll start there,” Harris said. “These fuckers don’t just start out big. Somewhere there’s a record on him. Even if it’s for something like soliciting for prostitution.”

He said this as the waitress delivered the fresh round of drinks. She gave him a very strange look.

“I’m going to be in court most of this week and next,” Washington said, without looking up from the file any longer than it took to locate the fresh drink.

“I figured that would probably be the case,” Wohl said. “So why don’t you work the four-to-midnight shift? It is my professional judgment that the people you will be interviewing will be more readily available in the evening hours.”

Washington snorted, but there was a hint of a smile at his eyes and on his lips. He knew the reason Wohl had assigned him to the four-to-twelve shift had nothing to do with more readily available witnesses. It would make all the time he spent in court during the day overtime.

“I’m going to be in court a lot, too,” Tony Harris said. “That apply to me, too?”

“Since it is also my professional judgment that you can do whatever you plan to do during the evening hours better than during the day, sure,” Wohl said.

Peter Wohl had been in Homicide and knew that, because of the overtime pay, Homicide detectives were the best paid officers in the Police Department. There was no question in his mind that Washington and Harris were taking home as much money as a Chief Inspector. That was the major, but not the only, reason they were unhappy with their transfer to Special Operations; they thought it was going to cut their pay.

It posed, he realized, what Sergeant Frizell would term a “personnel motivation problem” for him: if they didn’t want to work for him, they didn’t have to. About the only weapon he had as a supervisor short of official disciplinary action—and both Washington and Harris were too smart to make themselves vulnerable to something like that—was to send his men back where they had come from. Which would not make either Washington or Harris at all unhappy.

He had a somewhat immodest thought: if they didn’t like me, to the point where they are willing to give me and Special Operations a chance, they would already have come up with twenty reasons to get themselves fired.

“Is the Flannery woman still in the hospital?” Washington asked.

“I don’t know,” Wohl said.

“She saw more of this guy than any of the others,” Washington said, closing the file. “Can I have this?”

“No,” Wohl said. “But I’ll get you both a copy. Payne, when we get back to the office, Xerox this in four copies.”